The Dark Bride Page 5

  “To have been named Knight of the Order of the Holy Diamond by her . . . ,” he says to me, “I think when I die that will be the best memory I leave behind.”

  four

  I’ve been told that a miracle prevented the infidels from sawing in half, with a cogged wheel, Santa Catalina virgin and martyr, and that they had to limit themselves to decapitating her and were unable to stem the flow of milk that ran from her wounds instead of blood, nor the curative aroma exhaled by her bones for the benefit of the sick who happened to be nearby. I’ve also been told that the anniversary of this horrifying episode is the date favored by the mujeres of La Catunga for being initiated into their professional life, their baptism by fire, as they themselves call it. I have noticed that prostitution promotes tendencies and fixations similar to those that in other instances I have observed in sicarios from communes in Medellín, truck drivers who have to pass through regions of violencia, the bazuco dealers on Calle del Cartucho in Bogotá, mafiosos, judges, witnesses, bullfighters, guerrillas, antiguerrilla commandos, and so many other Colombians who risk their lives on a routine basis. To begin with, they all wear one or several medals featuring the Virgen del Carmen, whom they familiarly call La Mechudita because of her thinness, her wit, and her characteristic long hair, and whom they venerate as the patron saint of difficult professions.

  Like the others, the mujeres of La Catunga know that those who fully embrace their profession risk their skin; unlike others, the mujeres know that they also risk their souls. Hence the meticulous, manic way in which they perform self-imposed purifying rituals, hence the importance that they bestow upon a saint like Catalina; they, who in some dark way also become martyrs, yield to tragedy and accept the notion of life as a sacrifice.

  Four months remained before the celebration of the fiestas of Santa Cata, just enough time to round out the girl’s education in love. But, as I had heard said so many times in Tora, man proposes and hunger imposes. Todos los Santos’s savings, which were diminishing, wouldn’t last until the date she had set for the girl’s initiation into the profession. So Todos los Santos decided to force her hand and release the artist into the game while she was still a little wet behind the ears, short on training, unpredictable in conduct, and psychologically immature.

  “You don’t make a man fall in love with you through gymnastics in bed or tricks in the bedroom,” was her first strictly professional lesson. “Leave that to those who don’t have other skills. What you should do is spoil him and console him as only his mother ever has.”

  One midnight in La Catunga, with the song of the cicadas particularly intense, a council of advisers was assembled at Todos los Santos’s house. Over mistelas, Pielroja cigarettes, and sweet pastelitos de gloria they argued without reaching agreement on any of the details of the mise-enscène. The greatest polemic centered around the choosing of the girl’s nombre de guerra, which in this case would also have to serve as her Christian name, because she swore she didn’t remember having been baptized.

  “At least tell us what they called you before you came here,” said Tana the Argentine, a veritable rattle of bracelets and necklaces, given to her by her lover, an engineer for the company.

  “They didn’t call me anything,” she lied, or perhaps she was confessing true abandonment.

  What she did tell them was that she would like to be called La Calzones, the underwear girl, in homage to her aunt, for whom she seemed to profess some admiration or affection.

  “Over my dead body!” shouted Todos los Santos. “I have never heard a name so coarse and devoid of style.”

  “But if that name brings the girl good memories,” Olguita dared to venture, her nature made velvety by the polio that had withered her legs.

  “Good memories don’t exist. All memories are sad,” Todos los Santos said, ending the discussion.

  “Let’s call her María, Manuela, or Tránsito, for God’s sake, they were all important women and heroines in novels,” proposed Machuca, the blasphemer, who was a high school graduate with a diploma, and a devoted reader.

  “What does that have to do with anything? None of them had to offer up their asses.”

  “Well, if that’s the requirement, then call her Magdalena.”

  “Don’t even mention that renegade, first she sinned, then she spent the rest of her life crying with regret.”

  “Then what about Manón or Naná, who made history in Paris?” suggested Machuca, her mouth watering.

  “Paris and Tora can’t be mentioned on the same day.”

  “Why not Margarita, then?”

  “Margaritas also cry too much. And they fall in love with money, and die spitting blood. I tell you, names of flowers bring bad luck.”

  “Well, Flor Estéves, who was my aunt on my father’s side,” offered Delia Ramos, “was said to have found heaven in a sailor’s love.”

  “Sailors kiss, then they leave,” Todos los Santos recited the only line of poetry her memory had retained.

  “Rosa la Rosse always sounded so sweet to me . . . ,” sighed Olguita. “I would have loved to have been called that. But I got tangled up in this profession without realizing it and when I opened my eyes I was already a consecrated puta and they just kept calling me Olguita, like when I was good. They say that God doesn’t forgive those who work under the names they were baptized with. They say it sullies the holy name and takes it in vain.”

  “God has gotten so old and he still hasn’t stopped inventing sins.”

  “It doesn’t do me any good to give you ideas, if you don’t pay any damn attention,” said Machuca testily, but she tried again anyway. “Call her Filomena, who was the winner in a tournament of beautiful breasts.”

  “Maybe that Filomena had hers very much in order,” interjected Delia Ramos, “but on this child they’re barely showing, and you can tell that as an adult they’ll sprout scant and pointed, like a Turkish slipper.”

  “I heard about an incredibly extraordinary puta who was called Cándida . . . ,” mused Olguita.

  “Don’t even think about it,” said Machuca. “That Cándida deserves a place among the gods of Olympus for bearing eternal torture chained to a bed, like Prometheus to his rock. Cándida is a myth of sublime flight and this poor little girl of ours is nothing more than a vile mortal.”

  “You read so many books and invent so many beautiful things,” said Tana to Machuca, “and just look at the sad name you’ve got.”

  “I use it because that’s what a poet I once loved called me,” said the latter in self-defense, then became lost in the shadows of days gone by.

  They got tangled up in meditations without reaching a satisfactory solution and instead ended up postponing other urgent decisions, like fixing the fee and selecting the corresponding color of lightbulb in accordance with the standing hierarchies and conventions in La Catunga. The girl was as copper-colored and Indian-looking as the pipatonas, and according to that she should have been accorded a minimal remuneration, but Todos los Santos aspired to the highest destiny for her student and she wouldn’t resign herself to condemn the girl to a lowly white lightbulb.

  “It can’t be,” she lamented. “With those beautiful almond eyes she’s got, like a Japanese princess’s!”

  “That’s it.” From the haze of her mistelas Delia Ramos saw the light. “Japanese! Let her be the only Japanese girl in this red-light district, and that way she can charge an exclusive fee.”

  “Such nonsense! The Japanese are yellow like chickens . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter, nobody around here would know the difference because they’ve never seen one.”

  “Besides, coloring can be lightened with rice powders . . .”

  “But she doesn’t speak Japanese.”

  “And you think, mother, that these French women of ours speak French? If they ever knew it, they forgot it a long time ago. And nobody complains; after all, the profession has a universal language.”

  Olguita suggested the name Kimono, the only
word she knew in Japanese, and Delia Ramos came up with another possibility:

  “I say that it would be best to call her Tokyo.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A big city in Japan.”

  “It won’t do, it’ll scare off the gringo clientele.”

  “Despite everything, Tokyo sounds very good to me.”

  “In that case Kyoto would be better.”

  “Why not Sayonara?”

  “Kimono or Sayonara,” declared Todos los Santos. “Either of the two would work.”

  “Sayonara is more beautiful, it means good-bye.”

  “Good-bye forever?” sighed Delia Ramos tragically, already drunk.

  “It just means good-bye.”

  “Let the girl choose.”

  Without even thinking about it, the girl chose Sayonara and from then on she clung to that word, which she had never heard before, as if in it she had finally found the stamp of her identity.

  “Then let it be Sayonara. Sayonara. You will no longer be the girl, but Sayonara,” they approved unanimously, and there descended over them, leaving their hair gray, that drizzle of soot that falls from the ceiling every time a childhood ends before its time.

  “Four months,” said Delia Ramos between hiccups. “Only four months and she would have been an adult.”

  “It’s all the same,” said Todos los Santos, “four months more or less. Which of us didn’t start too early? Childhood doesn’t exist, it’s a luxury invented by the rich.”

  Today, despite her eyes being bathed in clouds, Todos los Santos tells me she can see with perfect clarity that upon adopting that name with the flavor of good-bye, Sayonara unknowingly—or perhaps she did know it—sealed her own fate and that of all of La Catunga.

  On one thing Todos los Santos, Olguita, Delia Ramos, Tana, and Machuca did agree that night, which was to select señor Manrique as the girl’s first client, the one who would initiate her in the profession prior to her social and official presentation at the Dancing Miramar. He was a soft, kind man of some fifty years, all reverence and old-fashioned courtesies, one of those who breaks bread with his hands so he won’t have to plunge a knife into it. He worked as the quartermaster general of the commissary at the Troco, where he earned a good living, and visited the chicas of La Catunga every night to have eventual and insignificant sex with them, dispersed among dozens of games of dominoes, imperative, long, and impassioned.

  “What do you think, girl? After all, you are the interested party . . .”

  “I don’t care.”

  Señor Manrique would have been accepted unanimously if a bilious blonde named Potra Zaina hadn’t planted a tempting worry at the last moment:

  “Let her first time at love be with Piruetas, he really knows how to dance and make a woman feel alive.”

  None of them, not even Todos los Santos, was immune to the difficult charms of Piruetas, who came in and out of their lives with a dancer’s agile moves. Unpredictable, incomprehensible, slick, he made them all suffer with his snubs; from all of them he obtained benefits of bed and kitchen in exchange for gazes from his lying eyes; they all loved him without charging him a peso so that he, in return, would teach them tango steps and the latest pirouettes in the dancing salons of Pereira and the capital.

  “Hey, Piruetas!” they would shout competitively at him when they saw him pass, a figure of ambiguous temperament, malevolent hat, and patent-leather shoes. “Slay me with those eyes! Come, love, show me a new number, one of the ones only you know.”

  “Prostitutas, like bullfighters, try to ease sorrows with superstitions,” Todos los Santos assures me. “One of their many beliefs says that the man who breaks a woman in marks her life from then on. That’s why the selection of the first client was a delicate matter and why a melancholy man would be rejected, for example, or a glutton or a sick man. All the pains, of the body and the soul, are transmitted through the sheets.”

  “Piruetas for Sayonara?” shot Tana. “Don’t even think about it, he’s a fancy man who plays crooked.”

  “Life is short and you have to know how to enjoy it, and we aren’t going to condemn the girl to bitterness by starting her out with a tattered old man,” interjected Machuca.

  “On the contrary, she shouldn’t become accustomed to thinking work is idleness and the salary is enjoyable, because later there’s no way to rid her of the habit.”

  “Who said such foolishness! If she is going to live off of her body, then let her at least shake it out and enjoy it. Sanctimoniousness will only bring you communion wafers!”

  “Death is always crouching somewhere and the trick is to discover where before it lashes out at you.” Todos los Santos uttered those somber words and the other women didn’t understand what they had to do with anything. “I’ll say just one thing: In this barrio death dances around, so very slyly, in Piruetas’s shoes.”

  An uncomfortable silence descended and the women pressed against one another, seeking the antidote to that shivering thought.

  “I am not one to prohibit the girl from dealing with Piruetas,” continued Todos los Santos. “You all know that for years he has been in and out of my bed as he chose. He casts his net over all of us and sooner or later she too will have to feel the brush of his effeminate fingernails, sparkling with polish. But it’s preferable that it be later rather than sooner.”

  The dawn fell thick with humidity and shrouded in the screaming of seagulls over the gentleness of the river, and the girls went each one to her own home, grateful along the way for the existence of affable men like Manrique, who soften the ominous fascination that they all, without exception, felt toward cruel men like Piruetas.

  When he learned that the girl’s hour had arrived, and that the chosen novio for her first time was old Manrique, Sacramento’s spirit crashed to the ground and shattered into a thousand pieces.

  “So even then you loved her?” I ask.

  “Loved her, no. Love, what people call love, not sleeping at night or eating during the day thinking about a woman, señorita Claire inspired something like that in me, always solitary even when she was accompanied, with that mystery of hers, made of dark circles under her eyes and pale skin under her dress. Or señora Machuca, with her thirty years of life so well lived that there was nothing beautiful or ugly in this world left for her to discover. Or even Olguita, so compassionate, her legs useless, like a mermaid, who half frightened me and half fascinated me with those steel orthopedics pressing against her flesh. I loved and desired all of them until I was crazy and even beyond. But the girl? No one falls in love with a wild-haired, slippery, surly tadpole. At that time she was to me something worse and much stronger than love. She was the pain of my conscience.”

  Since he knew about señor Manrique, Sacramento was attacked by a frenzy of labor that was incomprehensible to the neighbors who always caught him taking a siesta in the shade of some tree and who now saw him slaving away under the broiling sun like a mad ant, thumping his cart along the streets of the pueblo from dawn well into night to carry cans of gasoline from the docks to the sawmill and lumber from the sawmill to the docks, to carry recently arrived travelers from the train station to the Hotel Pipatón and travelers about to depart, from the Hotel Pipatón to the train station, to haul cement or bricks to construction sites, cans of water to the higher barrios, sacks of rice and grain from the river to the cooperative and from the cooperative to the Troco’s kitchens. They even saw him dragging up to the peak of Cristo del Pronto Alivio sick people who were going there to beg for their health and the recently healed who were going to give thanks for the miracle of their healing. At the end of a week of maximum output he presented himself in Todos los Santos’s house with his pockets filled with coins, which he dumped on the table in the kitchen.

  “I have come to pay for the girl’s thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “Her first night of love.”

  Olguita, Tana, Machuca, Delia Ramos, all of them had gathered to prep
are tamales for the leper colony bazaar, with corn masa and pork wrapped tightly in banana leaves, then tied with string, and they all stiffened with their hands in the masa when they saw the boy’s expression of pathetic solemnity as he delivered his capital; the wind of life or death ruffling his hair; the lyric tenor’s ardor with which he had burst onto the scene of tamale preparation, trying to prevent the inevitable by presenting his petition; his delicate supplication that broke into stammering when the chuckling started and he saw the women doubled up with laughter over the yellow corn flour, and their laughter slid like liquid fire through his ears, ulcerating his body inside, burning even more because of the presence of his idolized Claire, who wasn’t making tamales with the others, of course, but was sitting there in the background painting her fingernails killer red, and who, like the others, threw the boiling flood of her laughter in his face.

  “Come here, my precious child,” said Machuca, still shaking from the hilarity of it, crushing his face against her soft breasts. “This boy is worth his weight in gold.”

  “Such beautiful curly eyebrows!” said Olguita, kissing his eyes. “When he grows up he’s going to be a considerate man, God bless him.”

  Once again able to be serious, Todos los Santos gathered up the coins on the table, put them in a paper bag, took some more coins from her savings drawer, and put them in the bag too.

  “Take this,” she said to Sacramento, giving him the bag. “Take the girl to the movies. Buy some chocolates and cotton candy, you’ll have more than enough there.”

  The two kids went to the movies together and saw a few westerns in which a riled-up John Wayne didn’t leave an Indian standing. But when they got back to Todos los Santos’s house, Sacramento said he didn’t want to go inside and stubbornly insisted on saying good-bye at the door.